Police officer whose troubles brought down the Berthoud Police Department started career in Trinidad, which knew of his past

With a guilty plea to felony fraud on his rap sheet, Jeremy Yachik should not have been allowed to work as a police officer in Colorado, according to the state's regulations on law enforcement hiring and licensing.

But in 2005, the Trinidad Police Department in southern Colorado hired Yachik. He resigned less than seven months later after superiors found he had lied about alleged misconduct and after they began investigating allegations of domestic violence.

He soon found work nearly 250 miles north with the Berthoud Police Department, where he lost his job in 2014 after his then-fiancée circulated a video of him punching, kicking and choking his 15-year-old daughter.

"I think a lot of people gave him the benefit of the doubt and believed him because he was a police officer," said Yachik's former fiancée, Ashley Saint-Roberts, who said she struggled to convince authorities that Yachik was repeatedly abusing his daughter and was a threat to the public.

Yachik has been convicted of child abuse. He now faces felony charges of repeatedly sexually assaulting a minor when she was 6 to 7 years old and 13 to 14 years old. He caused so much controversy in Berthoud that authorities disbanded the police force there amid allegations of a coverup.

Just last month, Evans police arrested him again, this time for allegedly elbowing his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach.

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Yet Yachik remains certified to work as a police officer in Colorado, the result of the state's porous system for police hiring and discipline.

It's a system that has allowed troubled individuals with a history of brutality, violence and dishonesty to continue working in law enforcement while engaging in serious misconduct, a series of investigative articles by The Denver Post over the past year found.

Questions persist over why Yachik was allowed to work as a police officer in Colorado considering he had pleaded guilty to a felony charge in 1999 that accused him of defrauding a Hyatt Regency hotel in New Mexico out of nearly $2,000.

He was placed on probation for 18 months by a judge there, and upon successful completion, the judge adjudicated his case with no finding of guilt. Such deferred-judgment arrangements are not uncommon.

Colorado law bars anyone with a felony conviction from being certified to work in law enforcement. The law is silent on whether a deferred judgment, which can void a conviction, disqualifies an officer. But the state agency that certifies police officers is clear in its rules on the issue: Deferred judgments are considered convictions.

(The Denver Post)

The Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training agency, however, does not enforce its own regulation because it conflicts with judicial rulings, POST officials say.

In a 1992 case, the Colorado Court of Appeals stressed that the legislature, not government agencies, has the final say on when deferred judgments or sentences can bar an individual from employment in a field of work. That case noted the legislature passed into law restrictions that prohibit individuals with felony deferred sentences from being teachers but had not legislated that restriction for nursing.

POST officials cannot say how many law enforcement officers are working in Colorado after having received deferred felony judgments.

But The Post found that another former Trinidad officer received a deferred judgment for a misdemeanor assault conviction that would have barred her from police work. She received a variance from the POST director allowing her hire by Trinidad and, later, Glendale.

On Monday, the POST's board, which is chaired by Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, will consider amending its rules and regulations to bring them in line with practice and judicial rulings. The amendment would clarify that deferred judgments won't prevent an individual from being certified to do police work in Colorado after a judge dismisses the conviction.

Other states are going in the opposite direction.

Missouri, Florida and Texas all consider deferred judgments as convictions even when dismissals are granted by judges.

"All we have to do is establish the fact that the individual pled to this felony," said Glen Hopkins, bureau chief of standards for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which is in charge of police certification there. "You want to be able to establish that it took place, that there was a violation. You don't want case management to get in the way. If it happened, we need to deal with it and execute the appropriate action."

"Not suitable"

Trinidad Police Chief Charles Glorioso hired Yachik despite a memo from a Trinidad detective warning that he had an FBI rap sheet that showed he used an alias of Jeremy Yachil.

Yachik pleaded guilty in 1999 in Albuquerque to a fourth-degree felony charge of "falsely obtaining services" related to his fraudulent use of a credit card, records show. Yachik was sentenced to 18 months' probation and ordered to pay $1,828 in restitution and received a conditional discharge.

"It is the findings of this detective that the applicant is not suitable for employment by this agency," states the memo that Trinidad Detective Phil Martin sent to Glorioso detailing the New Mexico court case. The Loveland Reporter-Herald first reported contents of the memo.

Martin also provided information showing that Yachik's driver's license had been suspended at least 10 times in New Mexico and Oregon.

Yachik was hired to patrol Trinidad streets anyway. Soon he was causing controversy.

About six months after his hiring, he was suspended for five days when a superior determined Yachik had failed to "provide a truthful account" of his breaking a squad car's speedometer with his baton. Weeks after that suspension, Yachik was suspended for two days for failing to file a report of a citizen's dog bite and lying to his superiors about whether he had turned the report in.

Nearly a month later, he resigned from the Trinidad force amid his third internal-affairs investigation, this one for allegations of domestic violence. Officials in Trinidad declined comment.

After leaving Trinidad, Yachik was hired as an officer in Berthoud in late 2007. His downfall came after Saint-Roberts sent a video of him assaulting his daughter to media outlets and to the Loveland police. She also alleged that Berthoud Police Chief Glenn Johnson had refused to act when she sent him the video, an allegation later confirmed by investigators.

Loveland police said the girl told them Yachik abused her almost daily for years. He restrained her hands with handcuffs or zip ties and slammed her head into a wall, which left a hole in the wall, according to her account. He also beat her with ropes and forced her to eat Ghost Pepper sauce, roughly 10 times hotter than habanero peppers. The girl said Yachik used a "straight-arm-bar takedown" against her, a technique he had been trained to use as a police officer.

Saint-Roberts said she had sought intervention before the arrest and had alerted child-protection services, and was told by a case worker that she needed to learn to give him space since he had a stressful job.

Yachik entered an Alford plea to one count of child abuse, a type of plea in which one contends he isn't guilty but says he understands there is sufficient evidence to convict him. Such a plea is treated the same in the court system as a guilty plea. He was sentenced to three years of probation, 30 days of a jail work-release program and 80 hours of community service.

In the wake of the allegations, Berthoud town officials disbanded the police force and had the Larimer County Sheriff assume patrol duties for the town. Yachik now faces charges in Larimer County District Court that he sexually assaulted a minor. His recent domestic assault charges are pending in Weld County.

Berthoud officials "allowed unqualified individuals to be hired and to maintain employment despite glaring signs of inappropriate and sometimes illegal behavior," said a memo to the Berthoud Town Council from Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith.

Others with troubled past

Yachik wasn't the only officer with a troubled past to find work with the Trinidad Police Department. The Post found two others, both of whom have moved to other police departments.

Before her hiring in Trinidad, Megan Gillis-Todd pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree assault in connection with domestic violence allegations and received a deferred judgment. The assault charge is one of 44 misdemeanors, in addition to all felonies, for which a conviction bars someone from working in law enforcement in Colorado. Variances can be granted for misdemeanor convictions.

In 2010, Paul Schultz, the POST agency director at the time, granted Gillis-Todd a variance that allowed her to become certified for police work.

Lauren Riddle had a 2005 conviction for disorderly conduct before her hiring in Trinidad. That charge is not one of the disqualifying misdemeanors for police work in Colorado. She also had been fired from her job as a deputy with the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office in 2010, according to her job application.

On their applications, each woman detailed eight instances of using controlled substances.

Police involved in the arrests failed to supervise the informant and ignored warning signs, according to two lawsuits. One of the suits named Riddle as a defendant, claiming she and other officers intentionally submitted false and incomplete affidavits and failed to substantiate allegations from an unreliable informant.

Gillis-Todd helped oversee some of the arrests, although she was not named in the suits. Police affidavits show that in a case that ensnared a probation officer, a field test Gillis-Todd conducted on suspected drugs turned out to be erroneous.

Records released by the city of Trinidad show each officer resigned last year, with Glorioso commending their tenures. Trinidad officials said the only internal affairs investigation was from a fender bender involving Riddle. The Glendale Police Department hired Gillis-Todd, and the Englewood Police Department hired Riddle.

Neither officer returned calls for comment.

An ongoing investigation by The Post has found other rural towns have made poor police personnel decisions. Those officers often cycle from department to department in the state, The Post found. The attorney general's office has rejected the newspaper's requests for access to a database of officers in Colorado and their employment histories.

Smith, in an interview, said more small, rural towns in Colorado may start to contract with larger sheriff's departments to assume policing duties. Often those smaller agencies struggle to find qualified personnel and to train them, Smith said.

"They just couldn't get people," Smith said of the Berthoud police force, which he said had low pay and low standards. "They started getting desperate and hiring people we wouldn't hire."

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